Word processing – the world’s first “killer app” – enabled Wang Laboratories to threaten IBM’s decades of dominance in the computing world. The rise of the PC, and a troubled dynastic succession, led to the once high-flying company’s rapid demise.

Louis Pasteur’s bitter rival staked everything on a discredited theory of the role that germs play in the body. If his theories regain a measure of respectability, as many believe they already have, will statues of Antoine Bechamp appear beside those of Pasteur?

The naturalist whose contemporaneous insights into “the transmutation of species” may have shared top billing with Darwin had he not been immersed in field work in Southeast Asia at the time of Darwin’s first coming out party.